Rationalizing Madly on Valentine’s Day

By Daniel Akst

Call it the Valentine’s Day bias—the belief that, whether you’re attached or single, your own status is a kind of universal ideal.

The funny thing is that people often do this to cope with whatever dissatisfaction they may have with their own status—and the unlikelihood that their status will change.

Those are the findings of a trio of social scientists in a paper, forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science, called “ ‘The Way I Am is the Way You Ought to Be’: Perceiving One’s Relational Status as Unchangeable Motivates Normative Idealization of That Status.”

The paper is based on four studies, one of which is especially relevant today. The researchers asked 113 undergraduates on Valentine’s Day to rate the stability of their own relationship status, and then had them read a description of another person of the same gender (“Nick” or “Nicole”). Volunteers who considered their own relationship status stable predicted a happier Valentine’s day for Nick/Nicole if he/she had the same status as them (single or attached.

The paper isn’t online, but you can read a press release offered by the Association for Psychological Science.

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